There are legitimate concerns about ChatGPT taking away jobs but AI chatbots have created a whole new one — and it pays big money.
AI Prompt Writers AKA “Prompt Engineers” are the latest position created to help hone the output of the likes of ChatGPT, Google Bard, and more localized company-specific AI systems.
AI art generators are also looking for Stable Diffusion experts to fine tune their offerings. Given the recent AI boom, there is plenty of demand and with few people trained specifically in these systems, Prompt Engineers can earn upwards of $150,000 a year. Some may even bring in over $300,000.
One job ad for a “Prompt Engineer and Librarian” (first spotted by Bloomberg) is offering a salary between $175,000 and $335,000 describes the ideal candidate will “Think creatively about the risks and benefits of new technologies, and think checklists and playbooks. You stay up to date and informed by taking an active interest in emerging research and industry trends.” Interestingly, there is no mention of a coding background in the job listing.
You can even be a freelance Prompt Engineer, sites like Promptbase sell individual prompts and work as a commissioning space for engineers and artists.
How hard can it be?
It might sound straightforward but asking AI just the right prompts is actually a very specialized skill. If you think about it, prompting an AI is programming, just using a code that resembles the written word. Optimizing a prompt is the equivalent of coding a better system.
While there are sketchier get-rich-quick style ways to make money using the likes of ChatGPT, like writing poor-quality articles in seconds, these new roles offer legitimate careers with AI. Given the coding potential of these AI chatbots — you can literally ask them to code a “Pong style” game in seconds — this could be the future of the programming, design, and coding worlds, knowing exactly what prompts to use to create the perfect game mechanics or art for example.
While it might sound fun to mess around asking AI questions all day, in reality, this is a highly skilled job that’s only going to become more important in the tech industry, especially with ChatGPT Plugins and the ChatGPT API seeing the technology integrated into more and more places.
